Blame the blamer

Sometimes the supply of irony seems never ending.

Consider this sentence from a U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruling released this month:

“While judges are encouraged to engage in extrajudicial activities … they must be mindful of their obligations, inter alia, to uphold the integrity and independence of the judiciary, to avoid impropriety and the appearance of Impropriety, and to refrain from making public comments on the merits of any pending matters.”

Can you guess what this was about?

Earlier this year, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito got some attention because there were flags outside his homes that seemed to support the Jan. 6 rioters and/or Christian nationalists. If you were picky, you could think that maybe this showed some sort of bias and that maybe there were cases Alito ought to recuse himself from.

Could someone have formally complained about that?

No, of course not. The Supreme Court has ethics rules that they’re free to ignore. You can’t be Supreme if you have to obey rules.

What happened here is that something called the Article III Project — a group (or maybe just a guy named Mike Davis) that, on its website claims “Democrats and the far left are weaponizing the courts to undermine the Constitution” — filed a complaint against a Massachusetts federal judge named Michael Ponsor for writing a New York Times essay pointing out that the Alito flag thing didn’t seem all that ethical.

In other words, criticizing a judge for being unethical was unethical — and the chief judge of the Fourth Circuit agreed.

Among other things, the ruling said that publication of Ponsor’s essay diminished public confidence in the integrity and independence of the federal judiciary which, I guess, means that our confidence wouldn’t have been shaken by the Alito flags if only that one judge hadn’t pointed out the problem.

It wasn’t the flag flying that undermined confidence, it was the essay.

Apparently, judges need to keep their mouths shut about other judges. As long as nobody says anything, we can remain confident in judicial integrity.

Don’t feel bad about Judge Ponsor — the complaint was “concluded” because Ponsor wrote a letter saying he was sorry.

We can now forget about the whole thing.

More Article III. The Davis group (or person) has also filed misconduct complaints against judges who changed their minds about retiring after Donald Trump won the presidential election because keeping their jobs supposedly amounts to political activity.

And the choice of potential replacements wouldn’t be political?

Ethics are in the eye of the beholder.

Not insanity. The Montana Supreme Court last week ruled in favor of a bunch of kid plaintiffs whose lawyers argued that the state’s constitution included a right to protection from climate change.

The Montana government, its governor and a bunch of agencies didn’t want to be required to consider climate change when approving projects.

I won’t go into all the arguments, but here’s the weirdest one: The state claimed the trial court abused its discretion by denying a request to conduct psychological evaluations of eight of the kid plaintiffs. Apparently. the idea was that the kids couldn’t claim harm to their mental health caused by climate change if they were perfectly fine.

The court didn’t buy that one. You don’t have to be crazy to be against climate change.